Jimmy Kimmel just tweeted Donald Trump midway through the Oscars

Jimmy Kimmel took swipes at Donald Trump from the off (Picture: Rex Shutterstock)

He might be famed for shooting his mouth off on Twitter, but US President Donald Trump stayed strangely silent while the Oscars was being aired.

So much so that host Jimmy Kimmel thought he’d try and spur him into social media action midway through the ceremony, in a bid to provoke a response from the president after taking potshots at him throughout.

Which led to this moment when he whipped his phone out and tweeted Trump with the legend: ‘U up?’

(Picture: Twitter)

And as if that wasn’t enough, the host promptly followed that up by telling him: ‘#merylsayshi’.

Ouch.

The move certainly proved popular on Twitter also, spawning almost 155,000 retweets within minutes of being posted, as people flocked to the site to see if the tweet was actually real.

Of course this wasn’t the only swipe Kimmel took at Trump during the course of the evening.

Having kicked off early on by telling the audience the show was being watched across the world ‘in more than 225 countries who now hate us’, he said: ‘I want to say thank you to President Trump… remember last year when it seemed the Oscars were racist? That’s gone, thanks to him.’

Kimmel went on to poke fun at Trump’s remarks about Meryl Streep in the wake of her Golden Globes speech, in which he referred to her as ‘overrated’.

‘One actress has stood the test of time for her many uninspiring and overrated performances,’ he quipped. ‘This is Meryl’s 20th Oscar nomination… she wasn’t even in a movie this year, we just wrote her name in out of habit.’

He added: ‘Nice dress by the way – is that an Ivanka?’

At the time of writing, incidentally, Trump has yet to respond to Kimmel’s tweet.

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